Detroit: A Bridge Loan Too Far?

BMW in South Carolina: This is not your father's Oldsmobile

Conspicuous by their silence in the debate over the not-quite-approved $15 billion bridge loan to General Motors and Chrysler are a bunch of automakers that have poured nearly $40 billion into 70 American factories over the last three decades.

We're talking Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Subaru, BMW and Mercedes.

This muted stance has much to do with these manufacturers' home governments giving them financial and logistical help to build assembly plants and other facilities in the U.S. and the criticism that anything they might say regarding Detroit's struggles would provoke.

But there is a second and ultimately more important reason as well: These automakers are prospering to varying degrees despite a recession-driven downturn in sales because all have been able to reduce costs by innovating while GM and Chrysler have fallen well behind with bloated product lines that appeal more to rental car companies than hip buyers. Ford, which has not asked for a piece of the $15 billion, is in somewhat better shape because it already is well into an aggressive cost-cutting campaign.

"It’s a validation of all the years of working to prove they're good corporate citizens, even if they haven’t convinced people that they’re 'American’ corporations,' " said John Paul MacDuffie, an associate professor of management at the Wharton School.

The bailout bill has passed the House, but in yet another sign of the weakness of President Bush, the lamest of lame ducks, at this late date, some of his fellow Republicans are holding up the bill in the Senate.

It is no surprise that two of the most severe critics of the bridge loan and earlier bailout initiatives are Republican Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who have been harshly critical of Detroit's incorrigibility.

As it is, Alabama has three assembly plants and an engine plant operated by four thriving foreign manufacturers that have been worth $3.8 billion to that state, while Tennessee has Nissan's North American headquarters, a Nissan plant and soon will have a plant operated by Volkswagen.

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Volkswagen, in fact, was the first foreign manufacturer to build cars in the U.S., but its initial foray was star crossed.

Beginning in 1978, VW built the Rabbit, Rabbit pickup truck, Golf hatchback and Jetta sedan at an unfinished Chrysler plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. But despite the success of the models elsewhere, sales fell dramatically because of quality issues and unfavorable exchange rates, and the plant was shuttered in 1988.

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Considering how fricking ineffective they've been, the fixation with naming government "czars" to tackle big problem areas borders on the ridiculous. Have the drug czar, homeland security czar, war czar, energy and food-safety czar (betcha didn't know there was one of them) really made a difference? Of course not.

This makes the notion of a car czar, one of the provisions of the bridge loan package, to be laughable, but in a scary and not ha-ha way.

Although the term car czar rolls off of the tongue nicely, there are two big problems with such a person, who is formally known as a "presidential designee," which is far less headline-writer friendly:

* The possibility that automakers getting the bailout will self-censor. That is, GM and Chrysler will make only moves they think can get approved, which also would be self-stiffling when it comes to the kind of companies they must become to survive.

* The car czar will be a smacked ass. That is, too much of an insider or too much of an outsider. It's difficult to imagine which would be worse.

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Not to rub it in or anything, but Honda has topped the J.D. Power Customer Retention Survey for the first time.

As surveys go, to my mind the retention survey says a whole lot more about a car than the initial quality survey, dealer satisfaction survey and others because it reflects how many people are so happy with their ride that they go out and buy another one.

Honda clocks in at a retention rate of nearly 65 percent, edging Toyota by 1.5 percent. Lexus is third at 60.4 percent, followed by Mercedes (58.6) and BMW (58.5). Ford scores the highest among domestic automakers (52.5), which is kinda ironic since Jaguar scored the lowest at 26.2 percent.

Ironic because Jaguar, if you didn't know, was made by Ford until earlier this year when it unloaded the once proud English marque on an Indian company.

Photo by Ken Osburn/Greenville (S.C.) News via AP